If you joined me for the first video, I went over five running form habits that you should break. Now today, I want to talk about three other bad habits that runners do that we definitely need to get out of the habit of.
If you haven’t joined me on the channel before, I’m Jesse Funk. This is a show called Runner’s High. And you, if you love running, should stick around. So, hit that subscribe button, stick around with me for future episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Now, if you want to see that five running form bad habit video, stick around to the end, I’m going to link to it. It’ll be on the screen like it is with YouTube’s nice options. But for now, let’s go through the three bad habits you need to break that don’t have to do with running form.
Number one, and this is a very common one, especially for new runners. But if you’re getting excited, then this can be a pitfall as well, and that is going out too hard. This doesn’t really matter where you are, what you’re doing, whether you’re racing, whether you’re going on a long run, whether you’re doing a training run, you’re doing intervals; going out too hard is almost a death knell for a positive workout. Because you’re going to burn that glycogen too quick, and then you’re not going to have the sustain power. So, it is crucial that you do not go out too hard. Really, what I found is that the antidote to this is to go out easier than you think you should.
Now this takes some fine tuning to get just right, because you don’t want to go out, say a long run pace when you’re in the middle of a race, and you need to be going much faster. But you want to play it a little conservative in the beginning, give your body time to warm up and get up to speed. So, not only are you going to burn glycogen, but when you are going out too fast, you haven’t given your body and your joints the time to properly warm up for that particular speed.
Now, if you took the time to do a proper warm up, which can last up to 45 minutes, I’ve done a video on that before. Again, if you haven’t seen that, subscribe to the channel and go check that out here in a minute. But if you haven’t done a full warm up, you definitely need time to get up to speed for your joint. So, going out too hard is a huge bad habit you’ve got a break if you notice yourself doing it.
Number two, and this is more of a lifestyle thing and encompasses a lot of things is burning the candle at both ends. Now, this is really kind of a type A personality problem. I remember a teammate I had in college, very gifted, very fast, fast enough to be with us, running on scholarship, and he was very dedicated to his studies, he wanted to be a doctor.
Actually, two of them, my roommate and this gentleman included. But they would often pull all-nighters to study, you know, working hard, not getting enough sleep, doing all the workouts, and then you know, sometimes skipping meals to make sure they get enough study time in. While it is absolutely great that they prioritize the student part of being a student athlete, which is the important part, generally speaking for 99% of us, they did not prioritize their health and the long term effects of doing that.
So, it’s important that you balance some of those things because if you don’t sleep enough, you’re not going to recover. You’re going to end up in overtraining. And then you’re down this rabbit hole, this deep dark rabbit hole where your brain is fuzzy, you can’t study or go to work properly, you are fatigued and can’t get workouts done. So, burning the candle at both ends. It’s all encompassing, to trying to do too much. You have to say, this is what I’m going to do. And if there’s too much, you’re going to have to cut down or cut out some things that aren’t important.
Remember, if you’re spending time running, you have to spend time refueling, getting all that good food in and then regenerating, which in our case means sleep. So, don’t burn the candle at both ends. Make sure you prioritize the important things in your life. And if that means cutting down your run a little bit and just getting more quality runs in instead of the larger quantity, then that may be a route you have to go.
My last bad habit you need to break and this is especially prevalent nowadays is living by technology, being stuck to whatever your GPS watch is telling you, all the Strava data, how you’re competing with friends online. Whatever it is, living solely by technology is a huge bad habit you need to break right now if you want to get the most out of your body.
But not only get the most out of your body, enjoy it the most. What’s important here is that if you’re only paying attention to the data and what technology is telling you to do, you can miss some key signs and key indicators that go along with what I refer to as rate of perceived exertion or RPE. It doesn’t just pertain to when you’re running out, running out when you’re running,
Okay. So, rate of perceived exertion is important when you’re running and saying I feel like I’m running about this hard. This is the correct effort for this day. That is the first step. But not only that, you have to think after the run, how do I feel now? Did I push through the run with adrenaline? You know, did I tank it and then now I’m totally exhausted? Did I feel good because I ate properly? Whatever it is, knowing how your body feels is a huge component into maximizing your gains.
It doesn’t matter who I talk to on the Smart Athlete Podcast, another show I do here on this channel that comes out on Fridays, I’ve talked to a number of trainers, from amateur to Olympic level, Olympic level athletes; rate of perceived exertion is one of the most reliable measures across the board regardless of the amount of data. The data often ends up correlating with it.
But we know from doing these studies, and all these people doing these studies that I’ve spoken to that when we say okay, now we figured out this measure and we know the data. And the data says this, and we go back to rate of perceived exertion, it just agrees.
So, if you cut out the middleman and go straight to rate of perceived exertion, your body’s going to tell you things sooner than we have the ability to quantize those things and quantify them so that we know exactly what measures to look out to determine, hey, you need to do this or do that. Listen to your body, and you’ll be in good shape, both to run the best you can and to enjoy it.
Have you seen any other bad habits I didn’t include in my two part series here? Leave them down in the comments below. If you want to see that video on running form bad habits, it should be coming up shortly. I’ll see you next time on the next episode of Runner’s High.